


Stay

by rjn



Category: Numb3rs (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 18:09:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17027520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rjn/pseuds/rjn
Summary: Colby has a rough time when he's sick since SPY SAGA drug times. Don takes advantage of his weakened state to......politely inquire about some aspects of their relationship status.





	Stay

**Author's Note:**

> So I found this from a hundred years ago. So long ago, in fact, that the LJ that requested it from me has been purged. I hope it wasn't my failure to post this that made them disappear!! The request was for hurt/comfort, and eventually boning, but I mostly gave it existential relationship angst instead. I'd apologize but the requester doesn't exist anymore lol sux it. J/K if it was you and you live on here now, let me know in comments and I will try and work on it for you.

“Whoa. They weren’t kidding. You are pretty sick.”

Colby glares up at Don’s face, but the effect is somewhat dampened by the glassy-eyed fever-weak look of him. That and the fact that he’s slumped on the floor, his back resting against the face of Don’s desk drawers, his legs stretched out in front of him with feet flopped out to the sides, ragdoll-like.

“Uh-huh.”

Colby’s voice is more husky than usual, noticeable even over one and a half syllables. Don winces at the energy of his own breezy arrival in the face of Colby’s obvious misery. He had returned from a meeting to a warning from the bullpen that his office was full of snot-dripping Agent Granger, banished there by his germophobe teammates. He’d expected to find Colby laid out on the couch, crumpled up in the way he sometimes has that reminds Don that Colby is broad, but not tall, and that it’s only though a constant sort of natural effort that Colby looms so large in a Bureau full of six-foot-plus guys.

“Comfortable down there?”

Don sits down in his desk chair and turns it, rolling slightly so if he leans forward with his forearms on his legs, they can almost be face-to-face. Colby gestures vaguely at the open airspace above the desk.

“Privacy,” he rasps.

Don straightens in his chair to look through the glass walls of his office, evaluating lines of sight. Coast clear, he bends back down and scrubs his hand gently over Colby’s hair. He can feel the warmth radiating off the younger agent. That, combined with something about the way Colby sighs, triggers a mild panic in the back of Don’s mind.

“This isn’t… this isn’t something case-related, right?”

Colby shakes his head no before he turns his neck and tilts his face to chase the cool touch of Don’s fingers.

Don lets out a relieved breath. It was, ridiculously enough, a legitimate question. Just two weeks ago the team had arrested and handled the fallout from a literal mad scientist with what amounted to a weaponized version of chicken pox. But he can’t see where it could have got to Colby. They’d been careful, and isolated Professor Crazypants for the arrest during the one hour a week he left his laboratory. One of the biggest multi-agency-orchestrated, high risk takedowns of Don’s career came down to Charlie’s pattern analysis and Liz’s persuasive questioning of a disgruntled former university lab technician. With the henchmen involved in the case looking more like underfed grad students than hardened criminals, there hadn’t been much need for Colby’s hands-on approach to crimefighting.

Colby must notice Don is looking him over skeptically, and he shifts, straightening his back against the desk.

“I’m just… not handling it too good,” he says.

Since the freighter, Colby’s nervous system has been a little more vulnerable, and goes haywire with every common illness. He went from being the annoyingly cheerful co-worker who never gets sick and advises everyone on Vitamin C and echinacea, to being laid flat by every round of seasonal cold and flu that rips through the office ranks. The steady force that is Colby Granger gets crumbled down to an exhausted shaky mess and while his lungs have come back to marathon fitness levels for swimming and running, any kind of cold that makes it to his chest now lingers for weeks. The kinds of aches and pains that go with the territory for a guy like Colby sometimes flare up out of control now, too. _Not handling it too good_ is just typical heartbreaking self-faulting Colbyese for it’s hitting me harder than it should.

“You went to the doctor?”

Colby pulls a pill container from his pocket and rattles it in Don’s general direction. Pain killers that have unpredictable effectiveness with his out of whack system and which he won’t take anyways.

“David said he was taking me to lunch,” he pouts, and Don has to laugh. He imagines it going down like David was sneakily tricking a dog into going to the _V-E-T._

These days, Colby doesn’t need convincing to take himself out of the action if he’s hurt or sick, and he doesn’t need to be manipulated into going to the doctor, but it’s a _thing_ with David, a key part of the dynamic of their friendship, and they will probably always play out Colby’s supposed recklessness and David’s put-upon leadership style.

“Okay, let’s make it official, then.”

Don stands up and holds his hands out. He hauls Colby up. It’s less of a collaborative effort than he expected, no help from Colby’s end, and he has to hold him steady for a few seconds before he has his feet sorted. Once standing under his own power, Colby nods at Don’s questioning look and Don lets go.

“Officially,” Colby says, “Can I go home sick?”

“You officially can. I’ll even officially take off with you.”

“Thanks, Boss.”

He turns and walks himself around the desk, not noticing, or unconcerned by Don following closely. Colby doesn’t even stop by his desk, just shambles his way to the elevator. David catches up to them easily and holds out the jacket he’d scooped from Colby’s desk. Don takes it on his behalf and nods thanks.

“Feel better,” David says.

“You owe me lunch,” Colby grumbles, summoning up the meanest look he can muster before a shiver chases it off his face.

David rolls his eyes before he turns back for his desk.

Outside the building, Colby heads in the vague direction of his car. It’s a long hike to the desolate chain-link fenced lot. He lost his prime underground spot, a perk of being part of Don’s celebrated team, when the spy stuff went down. Don shakes his head after Colby’s retreating back for a second before he jogs ahead of him and blocks him, sticking his hand out, traffic cop style.

“Nice try,” he says simply, and bodily turns Colby to where Don has parked his FBI ride, in what they call the Rock Star spot, where Don can run outside and be on the road with sirens in five seconds.

 

Colby sleeps most of the drive, hunched over with the side of his head against his window. There’s just one coughing fit, but it’s bad enough that it has Don looking for a place to pull over safely before Colby manages to shake it and gets a few deep breaths in.

He insists on a shower when he gets home, which Don knows is less about cleaning up and more about the Colby Granger water method of soothing himself. The guy is crazy for living without a pool, or even a reasonably sized bathroom with a tub, given how much of a difference sticking his head underwater seems to make for his serenity. Don knows he chose beach-proximity over apartment fixtures, but maybe if Colby had left himself a bit more time to spend apartment hunting instead of being a triple agent… Well, it’s hard to have it all in LA real estate anyways.

Don gets riled up easily in Colby’s apartment, though. He’s been over a few times since the place was trashed in the course of that little “treason investigation” thing, but mostly Colby is at Don’s place. This apartment makes Don angry in a way he doesn’t quite understand but has something to do with how intensely sparse it is. This place is deliberately devoid of personality, when even a single night together at Don’s seems to result in a mountain of evidence of Colby’s existence; hospital corners on the bedsheets (100% Colby. Don has never made his bed properly in his life), jeans and socks left where they lie (evidence of Don’s bad influence on Colby), blender bottle in the dishrack, an accidental dusting of protein powder on the countertop near the fridge, takeout containers from the sushi place he likes, a towel for surfing, a towel for swimming, a towel for showering, a towel for the gym. It occurs to Don he never had to worry about having enough towel space when his overnight guests were women. Colby’s backpack, which was for a change of clothes for surfing until it was just for a change of clothes, always sitting where it gets tossed near the bed. Colby’s phone charging in plain sight even when he is in another room. Colby brings wholehearted trust with him when stays with Don too. By contrast this bare apartment still tweaks something in Don that makes him feel equal parts guilty and suspicious. But he knows it’s where Colby likes to be when he’s under the weather. And that association doesn’t help either.

It’s been too long, even for Colby ‘Gills’ Granger-level showering, so Don knocks on the bathroom door.

“You okay in there?”

The water sound stops, and there’s the squeaky slide of the glass doors, a pause, and then Colby’s voice.

“Actually, can you…”

Don is about to bust through the door when Colby trails off like that, but before he can there’s a shuffle sound and the door cracks open.

“So, I think my towels are at your place,” Colby says, kind of sheepishly. “There’s spares in the thing. Could you…?”

The thing is a footlocker, but Colby hardly ever calls it that. Certain words are Army words with Colby, and lately he steers clear of them. And in an apartment this sparse, “thing” is descriptive enough to suffice. Bed, Couch, Table, Thing. There are only a half dozen places in the tiny apartment that could hold something towel-sized anyways. Don pulls out a weirdly feminine coral-colored towel and holds it out at the bathroom door, shamelessly taking a long look at dripping and naked Colby as his reward. Colby seems to realize the relative absurdity of keeping the door half-closed at this point, and he moves fully into the bedroom while towelling off.

“Feel any better?” Don asks, hopefully, until Colby has to sit down on the bed when he sways while pulling on his boxers. He shrugs belatedly in response, and Don sits down beside him.

“You want anything to eat? I can get you lunch for real,” Don offers.

“I just want to sleep,” Colby says.

“You want me to stay?”

Careful now, because they haven’t done much of this yet. Whatever this thing is with Colby, it’s been hard-won and over-analyzed, because their friends are investigators professionally, and anyways Colby can’t bear to hide any aspect of his life from them at this stage. Add in Don’s deeply supportive and profoundly aggravating father and brother, and it’s never had a chance to be anything as informal as “messing around”. It’s just that their schedules are insane and neither one of them has much practice with anything beyond messing around anyways, so it’s only a handful of nights they spend together that aren’t fucking or goofing around, and Don’s not sure if he’s welcome on nights when they won’t be doing either.

Colby looks suddenly bereft, as if Don had just suggested leaving for good.

“If you’ve gotta work, it’s fine. I’ll be fine.” he says.

He scrambles down the bed, pulling the covers free and forcing Don to shift away. Don sighs with frustration and reaches his arm out, drops his hand on the back of Colby’s neck and stills him.

“I was asking if I should stay, not implying I didn’t want to.”

“Okay.”

Colby’s neck is shockingly warm, and Don knows he won’t leave no matter what answer comes, but he rephrases anyhow.

“What do you _want_ , Colb?”

“I’m just gonna sleep anyways. I don’t need…”

“What do you _want?_ ”

Don feels bad using that particular tone of voice, the one that’s vaguely boss-like. It’s the worst possible time for any kind of discussion, but maybe it’s also forcing them into some kind of brevity, a shorthand way of getting to the heart of something that’s bothered Don for too long; the way Colby doesn’t think he deserves anything that he wants.

And this is all part of it, right here in this bedroom, Don thinks. Because he doesn’t want to admit it, but initially he was attracted especially to this new, vulnerable, wide open version of Colby. The spy that was so good at protecting himself and walling everyone off, keeping himself unknowable, is now laid bare for Don in every conceivable way. Trust is the thing, for Don, the most important thing, and he selfishly likes that the stakes are higher for Colby. Maybe it’s completely messed up, but being raised by Alan Eppes, it’s difficult for Don to believe there’s such a thing as too much honesty and openness in a relationship. Being with Colby this way is the most challenging thing Don has ever done, but it feels like the most righteous.

Colby, who put everything before his own needs, before his own _safety_ , for so long, who couldn’t even conceive of having a dating life until recently, somehow thinks of Don like he’s some kind of cosmic reward for all the years of sacrifice.

But Colby is still _sorry_ and still careful, and in a lot of ways that’s almost the same as being closed off. And so with this, with what Colby wants, Don flat out asks, and it’s _work_ , but it usually results in something encouraging.

“Stay,” Colby says quietly.

 


End file.
